a portrait of santa cruz, part 2 - around town

This post is part of a series. To read the first post, click here. To see more Santa Cruz photos, click here.

EVERYDAY VIEWS

I have spent almost ten years walking around this town. I've never owned a car since moving here. I've always chosen habitations that would allow me to get to all the important things by hoofing it and taking the bus. The scenes pictured in this post are some of the most familiar sights in my daily life, so familiar that they are almost invisible to me now.

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a portrait of santa cruz, part 1 - by the sea

This post is the first in a series. To see more Santa Cruz photos, click here.

RED BAT SENIOR THESIS

In the summer of 2011, just as I was making the decision to leave Red Bat Photography, we scored a sweet gig with the City of Santa Cruz: to create a portrait of the city, in photos. They said they planned to use these photos for a variety of purposes. We were given a list of locations to include in our portrait, and told we could use photos from our archives if that would make it easier.

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Pinnacles National Park in fall 2011, part 2

This post is the second in a series. To see more Pinnacles fall photos, click here.

I woke up in the morning enthusiastic about the full day of hiking ahead of me at Pinnacles National Park. During my previous visit, I'd only had one day to explore, and no chance at all to enter the talus caves. We'd been headed for those caves on the last morning of that trip, when the rainstorm chased us away and ended our hike prematurely. I was glad to be back at Pinnacles so soon, and ready to pick up where I'd left off.

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Pinnacles National Park in fall 2011, part 1

This post is the first in a series. To see more Pinnacles fall photos, click here.

In early November 2011, I went camping at Pinnacles National Park. Hold on, wasn't I just there? Indeed, it had only been seven months since my last trip to Pinnacles. That's nothing. The blink of an eye, the beat of a heart, a fraction of a second, when I look back on it now.

But the time that elapsed between the two 2011 trips had felt like years while it was passing. Rather longer than the blink of an eye. During those seven months, I made the decision to leave Red Bat Photography to work on my own projects. By the time Sundari and our friend Aki invited me to camp at Pinnacles with them in November, I had almost wrapped up five years of wedding and portrait photography with Patrick. He would be carrying on with the Red Bat business, and I would be, as I put it then, turning amateur. My photographic world had been changed forever.

Some professional wedding and portrait photographers will tell you that they find it hard to pursue their own personal, non-business photographic interests when they spend so much time working on photos for their clients. Others will tell you it's no problem at all, they can easily do both kinds of photography. During the five years I worked as a Red Bat, I found myself mostly in the former category. Photos from my trips and daily life usually got pushed to the back burner, where they simmered but rarely came to a boil. I never quite mastered the art of juggling commercial and personal projects. Maybe someday I will– who knows? Anything is possible. All I know for sure is that, as 2011 drew to a close, it felt really, really good to stop taking pictures for other people. At last I would have the time and energy to work on my own photos.

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Pinnacles National Park in spring, part 2

This post is the second of a series. To see more Pinnacles spring photos, click here.

Sundari, Queen of the Flowers

It is remarkable to me now how much there was to shoot in a park that's relatively small, on a trip that only lasted three days. Fascinating geology aside, biodiversity is what makes the Pinnacles so full of photographic potential. When I was there in April 2011, I pointed my camera at all those lifeforms rather mindlessly. I had no idea what anything was called, and no time to look it up in a guidebook. Later, I did some reading, and while I didn't learn the names of everything shown in my Pinnacles gallery, I did find out that there's even more in that park than I'd suspected. Also, I learned things about lichens that answered some of my lingering questions.

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